Scale

On the plane over to New Zealand I read a book called Scale. Well, I started it. It gets pretty technical pretty fast. And as anyone in my Science B elective in college (“Lasers,” barely passed) or in Mr. Lowe’s class will tell you, I’m basically the last person on earth you want explaining physics to you (ammiright Brian Miller?) 

But what the first chapter of the book taught me continues to blow my mind to this day: mammals all get the same number of heartbeats in a lifetime.

A mouse that only lives for a couple years. A human who lives to 80. A whale navigating the tides for just over a century. Our heart rates scale with our size – the bigger the mammal, the slower the heart rate – but the total number of beats we get is the same.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of scale in the last week. How we gauge the bigness or intensity of something based on whatever frame of reference we have to go on. Remember the first time someone broke your heart? The first time you saw the girl you liked hold that other boy’s hand on the playground during recess. Or when it took your friends until seventh period to tell you they heard he’d asked someone else to prom yesterday after soccer. Or when the person who early on promised forever sat down one day and whispered, “I can’t do this anymore.” Remember the outsized feeling of agony?

Or the first crushing disappointment you ever felt. Scanning the posted list of names after tryouts, twice, and realizing yours wasn’t there. The state championship winning goal your glove didn’t quite deflect. Your reach-school decision that came back on a single piece of paper inside a thin envelope.

Or the first time you were ever really scared. After you snuck down into the basement with the horror movie VHS your parents had forbidden you to watch – and when you had nightmares later there was no one to tell without getting into trouble. The time your car broke down pre-cell phone era, somewhere along a desolate stretch of road on a day that was too hot. Or too snowy. Waking up to a TV image of a tower burning on a September morning 19 years ago. The first time you ever saw your mom or dad cry.

Isn’t it wild, looking back, how different in scale those experiences are. But how equal the magnitude of feeling can be. Getting denied from my top college choice the night of our senior formal felt like the end of the world. The boy I loved when I was 23 loving someone else felt like the end of the world. Last November felt like the end of the world. 

Is this the end of the world?

There’s one more thing I learned about scale before I hit the point where, no matter how many times I underlined the paragraph, my English major brain just couldn’t understand it. I’ll eff it up if I get into specifics but the general principle is this: there’s a limit to how big shit can get.

Giant beetles. Shelob-sized spiders. Godzilla. As the area of something increases and the volume of it grows, its physical structure has to be strong enough to hold it up. Monsters can’t exist because their limbs would shatter under their weight. The same rule applies to skyscrapers. The metals and compounds we mold into pillars are only strong enough to support so many stories. They can only brace so much glass.

There’s a limit to how much scale the physical world can have before it collapses in on itself.

Just like in high school and college, this is where the physics part of my brain stops working. But the non-science part can keep going. I think human scale is different. I’ve thought a lot about last year, when I scaled myself down for the first time I can ever remember. I made my expectations smaller and my needs quieter and my aspirations for myself a little narrower every day, trying to free up enough space to hold him steady. Trying to keep “Us” from collapsing in on itself. But the math just wasn’t that clean.

I spent last night thinking about people who’ve scaled up. Like my brother. He’s stared down demons that would have crushed so many others. Today he’s got a great job and people who rave about his work. He’s in grad school. He has a more genuine appreciation for the simple beauties around him than anyone I’ve ever met. A day hasn’t gone by without him reaching out to make sure I’m okay. I thought about my dad. And the year I watched him give three eulogies. First for his mom, then for his best friend, then for his father. He did it because he’s the person everyone wants to have speak for them. He’s the one we all believe when he says it’s going to be okay. His is the number we dial when we’re afraid or we eff up or we’re lost and don’t know what to do. His reassurance is always bigger than our fear. Our screwups can’t scale to catch up with his patience. 

To me, that’s the unique thing that happens when Scale meets Humans. The physics of it get busted. Sometimes for the worst. But more often for the best. It’s a question I’m still asking myself – I don’t know what I’ll be capable of if things get harder and my back is up against the wall. But right now I really want to scale up. I want to scale up my patience. My optimism. My courage. My ability to assume the best. My capacity for forgiveness. My instinct to just be good to people. Unlike a skyscraper, there’s no structural science that limits it. And unlike a mouse scurrying away its two years in a basement or a whale that will still be here after I’m gone, I get to decide what to do with my heartbeats.